Mark Hellinger (1903-1947), Broadway producer, columnist and later movie producer, died at the early age of 44. His Broadway newspaper columns, for many years appearing daily, were presented as short stories with a twist in the tale, in the manner of O Henry; indeed, the second Book collection of his cloumns was entitled "The Ten Million" (1934) in homage to O Henry's book "The Four Million."

Much of his staggering output can be found only in the files of the newspapers which published them: The New York Daily News and the New York Daily Mirror, and in synidcation in, it has been reported, 174 other newspapers. Many of the syndicated stories appeared in Australian newspapers in the 1930s and 1940s.

From these Australian newspaper sources I have collected two volumes each of 100 stories, from the 1930s and 1940s respectively.

Mark Hellinger's work has been in the PD in Life +70 countries since January 1 2018, and in the PD in Life+50 countries since January 1 1998.

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The sources for the stories in both volumes are Australian newspapers online at the Australian National Library, through the portal known as Trove, which has online OCR text files. Each story is from a different newspaper or issue. It's odd, looking at the HTML, that only the second 50 stories have the RUS span. I made the original version as two separate 50 stories volumes, then decided to do a single one. It was obviously in the second, but...

My route is OCR TXT file/RTF in Word/Word HTML conversion/Kompozer to create links, anchors etc/Calibre to create books. Not ideal, but it's the only one I can handle easily.

I can't see how RUS can creep in. I checked my language and proofing stuff in Office and it's all English (Australian). I don't think the RUS code does any harm; I've not noticed anything when reading; but it is puzzling. I'll dig through some other HTMLs and see if it's in them too.

Now that you say that Trove was your source I think I can see how this has come about. I have used Trove in family history research for newspaper cuttings. IIRC it supplements its OCR by on-line user edits.

Perhaps if it then takes the language declared by the web browser doing the editing and wraps that text in "lang" spans to match the browser that would explain it.

Certainly in reading the epub there is no problem - it's only if you open it up with an editor (in my case to try to sort out the atrophied index) that you see the mark-up.

Many thanks, BobC. I couldn't find the RUS tag in any other recent stuff I've done, from other sources, so it must be a weird one-off. As for the active Contents links, I'll redo them from scratch and see if they work properly. They are all there and work fine on my Calibre reader. Before that I'll load it onto my Kindle and give it a road-test as well.